Tralfamadore: unifying source code and execution experience

Program source is an intermediate representation of software; it lies between a developer's intention and the hardware's execution. Despite advances in languages and development tools, source itself and the applications we use to view it remain an essentially static representation of software, from which developers can spend considerable energy postulating actual behavior. Emerging techniques in execution logging promise to provide large shared repositories containing high-fidelity recordings of deployed, production software. Tralfamadore is a system that combines source and execution trace analysis to capitalize on these recordings, and to expose information from the "experience" of real execution within the software development environment, allowing developers to inform their understanding of source based on how it behaves during real execution.

[1]  Min Xu.  ReTrace : Collecting Execution Trace with Virtual Machine Deterministic Replay , 2007 .

[2]  Nicholas Nethercote,et al.  Valgrind: a framework for heavyweight dynamic binary instrumentation , 2007, PLDI '07.

[3]  Min Xu,et al.  A "flight data recorder" for enabling full-system multiprocessor deterministic replay , 2003, ISCA '03.

[4]  Benjamin Livshits,et al.  Finding application errors and security flaws using PQL: a program query language , 2005, OOPSLA '05.

[5]  Alexander Aiken,et al.  Relational queries over program traces , 2005, OOPSLA '05.

[6]  Sanjay Bhansali,et al.  Framework for instruction-level tracing and analysis of program executions , 2006, VEE '06.

[7]  Samuel T. King,et al.  ReVirt: enabling intrusion analysis through virtual-machine logging and replay , 2002, OPSR.

[8]  Tal Garfinkel,et al.  VMwareDecoupling Dynamic Program Analysis from Execution in Virtual Environments , 2008, USENIX Annual Technical Conference.

[9]  David W. Binkley,et al.  Program slicing , 2008, 2008 Frontiers of Software Maintenance.

[10]  Dawson R. Engler,et al.  RacerX: effective, static detection of race conditions and deadlocks , 2003, SOSP '03.

[11]  Fabrice Bellard,et al.  QEMU, a Fast and Portable Dynamic Translator , 2005, USENIX ATC, FREENIX Track.

[12]  Samuel T. King,et al.  Debugging Operating Systems with Time-Traveling Virtual Machines (Awarded General Track Best Paper Award!) , 2005, USENIX Annual Technical Conference, General Track.